Newsweakest

4 Comments:

I found especially interesting his confession that, even if everything that Al Gore says is true, the proposed "solutions" would not actually solve the problem.

To me, this is funny. If GW is exactly what the alarmists say it is, there are several very effective solutions. They are very expensive, but far less expensive than the Kyoto non-solution.

Why don't the GW advocates push for these solutions? I think it's because these solutions involve technology, and Technology Is Bad.

One of my favorites is giving the Earth a tinted windshield. Gregory Benford estimates this could be done for $10 billion -- which is cheaper than almost any solution. And it would be even cheaper to remove it, if we changed our mind. Not surprisingly, this idea has been deleted from the GW pages on Wikipedia....

Here's an idea. Eating PCBs has been proven to cause cancer. You don't want cancer. Now you could cut back on your PCBs -- but that would cost a lot of chemical companies a lot of money on clean-up and prevention of PCBs in the environment. Here's a scientist who has a great idea! A tiny PCB-eating machine that you can swallow. While it's in your stomach, it will (probably) eat the PCBs you ingest. (It worked in the lab!) After about a month it will pass out of your system (in the normal way) and you can swallow another one! We haven't done it before, but we really think it would work. (But we're not sure of the side effects.) Would you try it? It would really help save the chemical companies a lot of money. No? What, you hate technology?

Even Benford admitted in the short squib you cited that his "windshield" could have the negative effect of encouraging ongoing CO2 emissions that could then have other catastrophic consequences, such as drastically altering the chemistry of the oceans.